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I think it's easier to learn Hebrew first. Learning Yiddish first is like learning calculus by skipping algebra altogether.

Any good introductory text will have a few chapters on learning the alphabet. It's actually reasonably simple to learn the Hebrew alphabet, because it's all phonetic. There are only a few exceptions to the pronunciation in [Sephardic] Hebrew. Also, spelling is very regular and almost algebraic enough to be mechanical in some cases, without losing a sense of poetry. Modern Hebrew

I think it's easier to learn Hebrew first. Learning Yiddish first is like
learning calculus by skipping algebra altogether.

But learning Hebrew in order to learn Yiddish sounds really the long way around. I mean, Yiddish borrows a lot of nouns from Hebrew, but I don't see how one would have to know all the scary details of the Hebrew's morphology and syntax, to say nothing of its kooky vowel-marking system.

In fact, the only vowel pointing in the system is the
squiggle under the alef to distinguish it from a
silent (word-initial) alef. YIVO says to use one squiggle
to show it's an /o/ and another to show it's a /a/, but
apparently
some
people [amazon.com] don't distinguish those vowels at all. (Incidentally,
merging those two vowels is actually relatively common in Germanic
languages, I think.)

Cool. Guess it is simpler than I had thought. It's been a while since I attempted to read Yiddish, and I thought I saw some more vowels than just the kametz and patach under the Aleph. Typically, the letter vav is used as a pseudo-silent letter to produce the vowels "oh" and "oo", but it is really one of the letters that is used for a "v" consonant. Interesting that Yiddish switches this to emphasize the common use. (This explains why written Modern Hebrew (without vowels) uses the double-vov to indica